TURKEY PROBES SUSPECTED BACKERS BEHIND CHRISTIAN MURDERS
Agence France Presse — English
April 20, 2007 Friday 3:55 PM GMT
MALATYA, Turkey, April 20 2007
Turkish police investigated on Friday whether the assailants behind
the murders of three people at a Christian publishing house in eastern
Turkey had acted on their own.
Prosecutors in charge of the case were looking into whether there was
an illegal organization or a suspected mastermind behind the attack,
the Anatolia news agency reported.
Newspapers said the killers were believed to be members of a cell of
nationalist-Islamist fanatics recently set up in Malatya and similar
to one based in the northern city of Trabzon blamed for the murder
of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January in Istanbul.
The press linked the massacre to other recent attacks against
minorities in Turkey, including the Dink assasination and the murder
last year in Trabzon of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro.
Meanwhile the number of suspects detained over the killings rose
to 11 when police picked up a 19-year-old man in Istanbul, about
1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west of Malatya, a source close to the
investigation said.
The remaining suspects are also young men aged 19 and 20.
The brutality of the Malatya attack shocked the nation as Dr. Murat
Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily
Hurriyet how hospital surgeons strived without success to save Ugur
Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre.
"He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum
and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone.
"It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him,"
he said.
The two others who were killed, Necati Aydin, pastor of Malatya’s tiny
Protestant community, and German Tilmann Geske, a Malatya resident
with his wife and three children since 2003, were also tortured,
press reports said.
The abuse lasted for three hours as the five men detained at the crime
scene interrogated the three on their missionary activities, they said.
"We tied their hands and feet and later gagged them," the mass daily
Sabah quoted one of the suspects as telling police.
"Emre slit their throats," said the youth, who was not named, referring
to Emre Gunaydin, the alleged leader of the gang, who is at the same
hospital in serious condition after jumping out of the publishers’
third floor office in a bid to flee police.
Gunaydin, 19, had reportedly made several visits beforehand to the
publishing house to gain the confidence of the people working there,
newspapers said.
The daily Radikal said the German was the first to die and the two
Turks were slaughtered only when police arrived at the door after
receiving a call from a member of the Protestant community who grew
suspicious when he found the office door locked.
The Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches strongly condemned Wednesday’s
massacre.
"I think all Turkish people have condemned this mad act, the work of a
fanatical minority," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the pope’s right-hand
man and the Vatican’s secretary of state, was cited by the I-Media
agency as saying.
The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Chuch also condemned the murders
as a "violation of religious freedoms".
Proselityzing is not banned in Muslim, secular Turkey, but is generally
viewed with suspicion.
The killings were strongly condemned by the international community,
prompting Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European
Union Turkey is seeking to join, to call on Ankara to take greater
measures to protect religious freedoms.
